


Ground Rules

by saltsanford



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: (NOT between Maine and Wash), (no graphic sex it's all background stuff), (the violence gets a little graphic though), (their relationship here is platonic), Blood, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:40:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltsanford/pseuds/saltsanford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"If we're gonna do this, then we need some ground rules. Rule number one is, no one gets left behind."<br/>"Number two?"<br/>"Number two is...alright, I don't know rule number two yet, but we've got some time to think about it don't we?"</i><br/>As it turns out, they do.</p><p>Washington and Maine, and their partnership during Project Freelancer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ground Rules

**Rule one.**

Maine has never had the experience of being dragged across a battlefield before today.

This is, of course, because he's just too damn big. It isn't so much a weight thing- although that is a factor- as it is an... _unwieldy_ thing. He's boxy, all thick limbs and ropes of muscle. Combine that with several hundred pounds of armor, and- well. It's a problem, but one that he and his various teammates through the years have always managed to work around. Some solid cover fire, a well-timed Pelican rescue, and boom, they were in business.

Today, however-

It takes Maine a few seconds to place exactly what's going on, one, because he isn't used to the strange, stumbling sensation of someone half-dragging, half-carrying him. Two, because his partner's words seem completely out of sync with the sounds of gunfire and explosions echoing around them.

"So anyway, he was being such a cocky little shit and I thought, I mean, how hard could it be, right? So I said, alright, you're on, we do this amateur hour thing and if I win you have to buy me drinks for- oh! Are you awake? Oh god, _please_  be awake...Maine? Maine, are you awake? Are you-"

"Shut up," he groans. "Migraine." It's true, but he has to admit that the constant rambling _is_ forcing him to stay awake. He shakes his head a little, trying to focus on what's happening.

Washington has one of Maine’s arms slung over his shoulders and is gamely dragging him across a disturbingly open field. He's sagging under the weight, but the death grip across Maine's back that suggests that he isn't going anywhere.

"Happened?" he grits out. Whatever it is, it hurts like a son of a bitch.

"You got shot," says Wash, his voice high and tight. "Gonna get you out of here-"

He ducks behind a crumbling brick wall, dragging Maine with him as shots pepper the ground only a few meters from their feet. Maine winces as something pulses in his torso, and he glances down and, oh.  _Oh._ That's a lot of blood.

"That's a lot of blood," he says, helpfully, and Wash follows his gaze to where Maine's armor is stained a startling shade of scarlet.

"Oh, fuck, fuck, the biofoam's leaking, hold on..." he fumbles with his free hand for the pen clamped to his hip, sticks the pen in the gaps of Maine's armor, and depresses the plunger. Maine hisses in pain as the puffy foam expands and fills the wound.

"Still haven't...invented something...that doesn't suck," he groans, slumping a little against Wash, who looks at him in alarm.

"No no no, stay with me, look, the Pelican should be here any minute...see that patch of trees? We just have to make it over there and we're good."

Maine looks to where Wash is pointing to the cluster of willows that's at least fifty yards away. "Never gonna make it."

"Hey," Wash says sharply. "You shut the fuck up. I got this under control."

And to illustrate his point, he adjusts Maine's arm over his shoulders and starts off again. They only make it about five feet before bullets strike the ground directly in front of them this time, and they hasten back behind the wall. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Wash glances at Maine, then opens up the radio. "Niner, we're pinned down. We're not gonna make it to the rendezvous. Can you pick us up on the western side of the warehouse?"

"Negative, Wash." Niner's voice is a bit anxious as well. They must  _really_  be fucked. "It's too hot down there. Can you make a break for it?"

"No, we can't make a break for it! Didn't I already tell you Maine's been shot?"

Niner is silent before a tiny sigh whispers its way over the radio. "I'll see what I can do."

Which, Maine has come to learn during his time in the military, is pilot-speak for, "sorry, boys, you're shit out of luck."

Wash still has an arm around Maine and is craning his neck around the wall. "Okay. Okay, okay, we just gotta sit tight and..."

The ground is turning red at Maine's feet, and he looks down to see his wound leaking more blood. He covers it with a hand and once again, Wash follows his gaze. "What the fuck! I used half the pen to seal that!" He fumbles for the biofoam again, depressing the canister. 

Maine closes his eyes, wincing. "Wash-"

"Don't," Wash interrupts sharply. "Don't-"

"Go. You gotta go."

"Not without you," Wash says determinedly, and despite the pain and the encroaching fog in his head, Maine still has to roll his eyes at Wash's dramatic tone.

"Not gonna make it. You can run. You're fast." It's true. They'd made a good team before things went to hell, Wash zipping around in Maine's peripheral, a grey blur with his rifle. "Go."

"Shut the fuck up! I'm not going anywhere-"

Maine's legs give out as the fog inside his skull grows denser, and Wash sags as well, following Maine to the ground. "No no no no no, stay with me, stay with me."

Maine leans his head back against the wall, and gives a little punch to Wash's shoulder. "Go. Being stupid."

"No no no- Maine! Don't you dare fucking die on me! Come on, please don't do this- Maine! Come on!"

He tries to stay awake, he really does, because Wash is a good guy who doesn't deserve to have his partner die on their first mission together, but the fog is so dense and before long he is lost in it, the world nothing but a blur of fuzzy shapes and sounds.

***

Sometime later, the sounds give way to silence.

It's silent and still and Maine tries to remember how that happened. The only thing he can conjure up is a few blurry memories of Wash, firing his rifle and screaming over the radio for a rescue.

As Maine struggles to put the pieces together in his head, he realizes that it's not totally silent, after all. There's a soft beeping in the background, coupled with the sound of someone snoring, and it's such a strange combination that he forces his eyes open.

He's back on the  _Mother of Invention_ , in the infirmary, which explains the beeping, and Wash is in the chair next to him, dead asleep, which explains the snoring. He isn't wearing armor, and his arm is in a sling. His arm was just fine before Maine passed out, which leads him to conclude that he got that injury doing something stupid.

Wash would sleep for days if you let him, so Maine nudges one of Wash's knees with a hand. After a few shoves, Wash jolts awake, glancing around wildly before his eyes meet Maine's. "Finally! You're awake! Are you okay? Do you-"

"That." 

Wash stops talking, following Maine's accusatory glare towards his bound arm. "Huh?"

"How did you get that?" His voice is a weak and wispy thing, but it's enough to get his point across.

"What- are you kidding me? You almost  _died_  and you're gonna lecture me about a dislocated shoulder?"

Which is all Maine needs to hear to get a pretty good mental image of what happened after he passed out: Wash, dragging his unconscious body across a bullet-ridden battlefield like an idiot and jacking up his shoulder in the process.

"Stupid," Maine grunts, and Wash's eyes practically bulge out of his head.

"Hey! I'm not the one who  _jumped heroically in front of a bullet_!"

Ah. So Wash  _did_ notice that. Maine shrugs a little. "Instinct."

"Yeah, well,  _my_  instincts tell me to get my partner out alive no matter how shitty the situation."

They eye each other. 

"Fine. Even."

Wash blinks. "Huh?"

"We're even. Square."

"We're not even close to even, Maine," says Wash, exasperated. He pauses. "Think they'll pair us up again?"

"Hope so."

That startles a smile out of Wash. "We made a good team, huh?"

Maine holds up a fist, and Wash bumps the fist not wrapped in a sling. "If we're gonna do this," Wash continues, "then we need some ground rules. Rule number one is, no one gets left behind."

Maine rolls his eyes. "Number two?"

"Number two is..." Wash hesitates. "Alright, I don't know rule number two yet, but we've got some time to think about it don't we?"

As it turns out, they do.

**Rule two.**

Wash first learns to drive a car when he is thirteen years old.

The memory is a distant one now, blurred by the years and the sheer amount of times he’s turned it over fondly in his head. His grandfather had been the one to teach him, on sunlit day in August when they were the only two on the family farm.

Wash does not remember anything his grandfather said about the actual driving, but he remembers the squeaky wheels, and the smell of upturned dirt, and the way the sunflowers formed a protective tunnel around the truck as they drove through the fields. It had been a good day, a day when everything was right, everything from his grandfather in the seat next to him, to the wheel wrapped in cracked leather beneath his hands.

“I hate cars,” Wash says now, stretching his injured leg out before him with a wince. He’s lucky that his ankle isn’t broken, but it’s certainly sprained. “I really, really hate them. And they hate me! Why do they hate me?”

Maine grunts next to him. “It’s not a _car._ It’s a Warthog. Military vehicle.”

Wash waves a dismissive hand. “Same thing.”

“Not the same thing. That’s your problem.” Maine pauses, reflects. “You can’t drive cars either, though.”

“Hey! I can drive a car!”

Maine turns to him, the blank face of his helmet somehow seeming even blanker than usual. Wash huffs. “Okay, that time on shore leave doesn’t count, that was ages ago.”

“Two weeks ago.”

Wash counts in his head. Maine’s right, of course. Maine’s _always_ right when it comes to numbers. “Okay well…well, what’s your point, then?”

Maine snickers a little, then falls silent, contemplating the Warthog in front of them. It’s not so much a Warthog as it is a twisted pile of indiscernible metal. Wash had thought, at the time, that driving it off the ledge to avoid their assailants had been a sound decision. In hindsight, the ledge was more like a cliff; the sound decision, more like a wild hail mary. They’d been extremely lucky to have only suffered a few bruises, but the Warthog was irreparable. Wash had had to explain to an irate Director just why they needed an evac, and had been told it was going to have to wait a few hours, as all of their pilots were out with Freelancers who “hadn’t failed to complete their objectives.”

“Rule two,” Maine says suddenly, and Wash turns to stare at him.

“Huh?

“You don’t drive. I drive.” Maine jerks his head towards the mangled Warthog. “That’s rule two.”

“Well, then what are we gonna do if we….” Wash flaps his arms vaguely. “You know, we need you to…beat up the bad guys?”

“In a moving Warthog?”

“Well—”

Maine reaches out to tap the rifle lying across Wash’s lap. “Then you _shoot_ the bad guys. You’re good.”

“I’m good?” Wash asks before he can stop himself, wincing at just how whiny that question sounds. He’s a soldier, for god’s sake, of course he’s good, he knows he’s good. The only reason they let him anywhere _near_ the Freelancer program was thanks to his skill with a gun. But hearing it from a teammate—from a _partner_ —is different, somehow, then seeing it written down in his file.

“I drive. You shoot. Rule number two.”

He says it with a note of perfect finality, and Wash can do nothing but grin. “Alright, alright. I give.”

* * *

 

**Rule three.**

The gunfire ceases abruptly, but Maine’s ears still ring with their fading echoes. He puts his back to a wall and checks his trackers, opening up his radio channel with Wash. “Wash? You good?”

“I’m fine,” says Wash, sounding a little breathless. “We made short work of that, huh?”

Maine grins to himself, opening up a second radio channel. “Carolina. We’re at the rendezvous.”

Carolina’s voice comes back tight with controlled anger. “You boys okay to hang tight for a little while? York’s in trouble.”

“What?” Maine can practically hear Wash tripping over himself to get the words out. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“He’s pinned down and needs back up.” The hesitation before her next words is barely noticeable. “He’s been shot. It might be a little bit before we can get to you, is that—”

“Go go, it’s fine, it’s fine,” Wash babbles. “Jesus Christ, _go_. Keep us updated, okay? You will, right? You’ll let us—”

“I’ll give you an update when I have one, Wash,” Carolina snaps, exasperated. “Stay safe out there.”

She signs off and Maine switches back to his channel with Wash. “Where are you?”

“Maine, you think York’s okay, right? They’ll get there, right? They’ll—”

Maine rolls his eyes. “Stop. He’ll probably talk his opponents to death before Carolina and the others get there.”

“Right,” says Wash, sounding exactly no less worried than before. “Yeah. Sure. Right. I’m sure you’re right.”

“I know. Where are you?”

“We shouldn’t have let him go in there alone,” Wash continues, and all at once Maine feels the hairs on the back of his neck raise in alarm. “He’s shit at stealth, I don’t know why—”

“Washington,” Maine interrupts sharply, “ _Where are you?_ ”

Wash’s pause is shorter than Carolina’s was, but Maine is up in the time it takes Wash to get another word out. “Look, just stay where you are, we’ll meet up when the Pelican is on its way, alright? There could be more—”

“There’s no one else here,” Maine says, but even as he gets the words out he wonders if that’s true. He wonders if perhaps Wash is in a situation where he _can’t_ speak, but a quick expansion of his trackers proves that he and Wash are the only ones in the area. It also gives him a lock on Wash’s position, and he starts moving quickly towards the southwest corner of the building. “I’m coming to you.”

“Don’t,” Wash says, a little desperately now, which does nothing but quicken Maine’s pace. “Everything’s fine, I’m fine, I’m….”

He trails off alarmingly, and Maine breaks into a run, dropping all pretense. “….fine,” Wash continues, as if there’d been no break in his words, but there’s the slightest slur in his voice now.

Maine is at his position in less than a minute, skidding to a stop as he rounds the corner. Wash is sitting heavily against the wall, one leg stretched out in front of him, hands fumbling sluggishly at the seals on his helmet. “I think my helmet is broken,” he says, and his words are definitely slurring together now.

He’s not entirely wrong. There’s a sickening dent in the side of his helmet, and Maine drops to one knee beside Wash, tugging it off. There’s blood leaking from a gash above Wash’s temple where the helmet was damaged, but that’s not what has Maine worried. Wash’s eyes are drooping and unfocused, and when Maine tilts his chin up to peer into his eyes, it takes Wash several seconds to focus on him.  Concussion. A bad one, at that. “Maine. Is York gonna be okay?”

Good god. Maine quickly checks over the rest of Wash’s body, noting with dismay that there’s blood slowly pooling beneath his thigh as well. “Got shot,” Wash says helpfully, and Maine decides that he is _absolutely_ going to rat him out to Carolina for this.

For now, he puts pressure on the wound in Wash’s leg. “Is the bullet still in there?” When Wash doesn’t answer, he raises his voice. “ _Washington_. The bullet. Is it in there?”

“Yes…”

Great. A lodged bullet means no biofoam. Maine increases his pressure on the wound and opens up the Freelancer channel again. “Wash is hurt,” he says without preamble. “Concussion and gunshot to the leg.”

“What?” South is quickest to respond, her voice a little breathless the way it gets when she’s in the middle of a fight. “Jesus, Maine, why didn’t one of you _say something_ when we radioed in?”

“Wash wanted you to get to York first.”

“And you let him make that call?” That’s North now.

“Course not,” Maine snaps. “We were separated.”

“But—”

“Just get York out of there and hurry up!”

“We’re on it,” Carolina cuts in, and Maine is once again grateful for her efficiency. Never one to whine over the radio, Carolina. “Keep him awake, Maine.”

“On it, boss.”

He signs off the radio to see Wash frowning at him suspiciously. “Did you tell on me?”

Tell on me. Like they’re children, and he isn’t bleeding out on the floor of a warehouse. “Damn right I did.”

“Oh, c’mon, Maine…”

“Rule three,” says Maine. “No one says they’re fine when they’re _not fine_.”

“S’my turn to make rule,” Wash slurs, frowning at him.

“You can get the next one.”

“But—“

“Stop moving,” Maine says sharply, putting a steady hand on Wash’s shoulder when he tries to stand up. “Wash. You’re hurt. Bad.”

Half of a Freelancer would have his head for saying something like that. The other half would’ve delivered the news just as harshly. Maine has always been firmly in the latter camp, has never seen the point in sugarcoating injuries, especially when dealing with soldiers like Wash.

By soldiers like Wash, he means soldiers who don’t know when to stay down.

By soldiers like Wash, he means men who don’t know how to break.

At any rate, the words get Wash to stop squirming around. He blinks a little, touches the blood staining Maine’s gauntlets. “Oh,” he says, his voice smaller than Maine’s ever heard it, and in a way, that’s worse than Wash constantly trying to move around.

“Gonna be okay,” Maine says, because it’s true. “Just stay still.”

Wash nods, then winces at the motion. “Thanks.”

“Shut up,” says Maine. “You said you were fine. You’re not. Don’t do that again.”

Wash looks at him, hard. “Okay,” he says slowly, and his hand comes up to grasp Maine’s elbow. “Okay. But thanks anyway.”

It’s a full twenty minutes before the Pelican swoops down, but each minute stretches on into an eternity. Connie has the steadiest hands, and she works the bullet out of Wash’s leg with the emergency medkit so they can seal the wound with biofoam. Wash almost passes out from the pain, and Maine has to hold his shoulders down to keep him from thrashing away. “C’mon, Wash, you’re stealing my spotlight,” York cracks weakly from where he’s laid out several yard away, and Maine has to resist the urge to throttle the pair of them.

He feels marginally better when, hours later, Carolina comes storming into the infirmary and lectures Wash for a full thirty minutes on the importance of communicating honestly over the radio, then turns around to the adjacent bed and gives York an equally long lecture on how cracking jokes while seriously injured is neither appropriate nor amusing.

Wash casts a pained glance towards Maine as her voice gains in volume. “Okay, okay,” he says. “You win. Rule three.”

* * *

 

**Rule four.**

The first time the two of them are paired up to spar, Wash ends up unconscious with a dislocated shoulder. His bad shoulder, at that. He’s trained with Maine before, but always with guns or knives. But when Wash comes back from a mission with two black eyes and cracked ribs after losing all of his weapons in a fight, Carolina decides that his hand-to-hand combat skills are sorely lacking. She orders him to train with Maine, sans weapons, and Wash thinks dully before he passes out from the pain in his shoulder that he’s awfully glad he and Maine are on the same side.

He wakes up in the infirmary with Maine sitting by his bed. He’s starting to lose count of how many times they’ve woken up like this: one injured, one waiting. There are no medics around, and Wash has all of his upper body armor off, presumably because of the sling around his arm.

“You good?” Maine asks as Wash sits up, as if they were still on the training room floor and Wash had taken a hard hit.

He looks at Maine a little incredulously, then glances pointedly at his shoulder. “Um. Not really?”

Wash is a little ashamed at how wildly unprepared he’d been for their sparring match. He’d been losing badly from the start, but he’d been shocked to the point of panic when Maine had pinned him up against the wall, twisted his arm behind his back, and popped the shoulder out of its socket with no hesitation. Wash had already been dizzy from a prior hit to the head, and he’d barely had time to wrench his helmet off before he’d vomited all over the training room floor and fallen unconscious.

Now, Maine shrugs at him dispassionately. “Stupid. You let me grab you.”

“What—well, it’s not as if that was my _objective_ —”

“What _was_ your objective?”

“I—what?”

“Your objective. Fighting me. What was your plan?”

Wash is started to feel as if he’s missing a vital part of this conversation. “I….I didn’t….Maine, you popped my _shoulder_ out of its _socket_. In _training_. I mean, what the fuck?”

“What do you think your enemies are gonna do?”

“You’re not my enemy, though!”

Maine picks up his chair and moves it a few feet closer. His eyes are boring into Wash’s with an intensity he’s never seen before. “Wash. You have to think of me as one in training. It’s how you survive, out there.”

“But—oh come on, don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?"

“No. It’s rule four.”

Wash pauses. “ _What’s_ rule four?”

“We don’t pull our punches in training.”

“But—Maine! You can’t just go around landing people in the infirmary!”

“Then don’t let me.”

Wash throws up his good hand. “And how am I supposed to do that?”

“You get _better._ I’ll show you. I’ll help.”

“So this was, what? A lesson?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, my god Maine.”

“You won’t fight someone as strong as me out there,” Maine says. He isn’t smug, or even proud—he says this as a simple statement of fact, and Wash can’t really argue the point. It’s not only that Maine is big and strong; he is fearless, too. “If you can defend yourself against me with no weapons, you can defend against anyone.”

Wash opens his mouth to argue further, but pauses to think, really think, about what Maine’s saying. His hand to hand combat is terrible, he knows it, and half the team is right there with him.

“Tired of you all coming back with bruises and broken bones,” Maine says, as if reading his mind. “You’re all too reliant on your weapons. Weapons can be taken away. Your body can’t. _Use_ it. Make it a weapon.”

“Make it a weapon,” Wash says slowly. “I don’t know how.”

Maine reaches behind his back and grabs a pudding cup, dropping it into Wash’s lap. Chocolate. His favorite.

“I’ll show you.”

* * *

 

**Rule five.**

“That,” says Wash. “Was the worst plan ever. Of all time.”

Maine rolls his eyes. “Worked, though.”

“Yeah, _barely_. I’m not gonna be able to walk for weeks.”

Maine says nothing, just rolls his eyes again as Wash continues to whine all the way back to their Warthog. He’s come to learn that this is how Wash destresses after a mission: by complaining. Loudly.

He watches Wash start stripping off his armor and dumping it in the Warthog. “What are you doing?”

Wash looks at him like _he’s_ the crazy one taking his armor off in an unknown environment. “We’re not due at the rendezvous for another _three hours_. I’m getting some _food_.”

“Can’t leave our armor here.”

“Well, we can’t go into town with our armor _on_ , now can we? So it looks like we _are_ leaving it here.” Great. In addition to his trademark post-mission complaining, Wash is now whipping out his cranky _need-food-now_ tone. Maine sighs wearily, rigs his helmet to alert him if anyone comes within a hundred yards of the Warthog, and starts stripping off his armor as well.

“Besides,” says Wash as they trudge into town. “We’ve never been on this planet. We need to try their food.”

“Really. We _need_ to?”

“Yes. We do.” He brightens. “Hey, that should be rule five.”

“Ridiculous. That’s not rule five.”

“Yep. Rule five. Always sample the local cuisine.”

“God.”

It’s ridiculous, and probably a little reckless, but Maine can’t quite regret it when they’re leaning against the wall of a taco joint thirty minutes later, stuffing their faces. “This is a terrible idea,” he grunts anyway. “Carolina’s gonna kill us.”

“It’s fucking genius,” Wash says through a mouthful of food. “C’mon, Carolina’s never gonna find out. Rule five?”

Maine sighs, gives in. “Fine.”

In the end, Carolina does find out. A storm rolls in seemingly out of nowhere, and they’re forced to sprint back to the Warthog through sheets of a soaking rain. Wash is laughing, and before he knows it, Maine is laughing too. It looks like they might get away with their food run until Wash takes off his helmet on the Pelican to reveal his shaggy hair dripping with rain. Carolina yells at them the entire ride home, then scolds them again when they both end up sniffling pitifully all through training the next morning. “Catching colds from the rain like a pair of five year olds,” are her parting words as she stalks off.

But Maine can’t remember the last time he laughed in the rain, can’t remember the last time he did something so silly and pointless, and later, he will realize that that was the moment that he looked at Wash and thought not only _partner_ , but _friend_.

* * *

 

**Rules six and seven.**

Wash thinks that this rescue mission might go a little more smoothly if he didn’t have five margaritas in his system.

Nonetheless, he does, and he has to work with what he’s got. He can’t quite bring himself to _regret_ the five margaritas, as it’s been a _long_ time since he’s had one, and these were damn good ones. More importantly, drinking them with Maine had been fun. He’s pretty sure that Maine had eight margaritas to his five, but that isn’t the point. The point is, the margaritas. The point is, the first shore leave they’ve had in months.

The point is, Maine is nowhere to be seen.

Wash has spent the last forty-five minutes skulking around the hotel, looking for clues as to where Maine went. Clues. As if it were a goddamned murder mystery. It had cost him a kiss, a drink, and dance off, given to the bartender, the cocktail waitress, and the DJ, respectively, in order to get some real information on where Maine had gone. From what Wash could tell, he’d headed upstairs about an hour ago, and disappeared into room two twenty-five.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Freckles,” the bartender says cheerfully. As far as Wash can tell, he’s had at least as many cocktails as Wash himself. “He seemed more than willing.”

“Right,” Wash says distractedly, and he disentangles himself somewhat reluctantly from the bartender in search of room two twenty-five.

The nose from the bar grows fainter and fainter as Wash makes his way upstairs and down the hall. He finds himself outside of the appropriate room in no time, and knocks quietly on the door. He’d like to call out for Maine, but even in his inebriated state, he knows not to go yelling their Freelancer names all over the place. He knocks again. They should’ve come up with code names. Should’ve practiced using them. Should’ve—

The door flies open and Wash’s normally lightning-quick reaction time slows down as his brain tries to process the scene in front of him. There’s Maine, alright, and not only is he out of his armor, but he’s wearing _nothing at all_ except for a towel around his waist. “ _What?_ ”

“Um,” Wash says intelligently. “Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

“Eddie?” A woman’s voice calls out from the depths of the room, and Wash feels his eyes nearly pop out of their skull. He hastily whips the knife behind his back. “What’s going on?”

 _Eddie?_   Wash mouths as a woman comes sidling up behind Maine. She’s tall enough that she can prop her chin on Maine’s shoulder. “ _Oooh_ , who’s your friend?”

“No one,” Maine grunts.

“ _No one’s_ pretty cute,” she says coyly.

Jesus Christ. Wash wants nothing more than for the ground to open up and swallow him whole, but for all he knows she could have a knife to Maine’s back. He gamely clears his throat, ignoring the _get the fuck out of here_ death glare Maine is lobbing full force in his direction. “I had a cat once,” he says.

Maine stares at him. The woman stares at him. Wash suspects the portraits in the hallway are staring at him. Christ, he sounds like a raving lunatic. May as well go the whole hog now. “What was that cat’s name?”

“You had two. Ari and Skyler,” Maine says, after several more agonizing beats of silence, and now the woman doesn’t look confused as much as she looks intrigued. Wash thinks that might be worse.

“Right-oh.” Wash begins what he hopes is an extremely subtle side-step down the hallway. “Right. Oh. I’ll just, I’ll go now, I’ll…I’ll just go.”

Maine sighs heavily, then turns to the woman standing behind him. “Excuse me, Sylvia,” he says, and the woman—Sylvia, apparently—gives him a peck on the cheek.

“Of course, handsome.”

Maine storms out into the hallway, towel and all, and pulls the door shut behind him. “ _I had a cat once?_ ”

“Well, look, we never came up with a code question for this kind of situation!”

“What _situation?_ ”

“You know.” He waves his arms vaguely, hoping Maine will get it. Judging from the vein pulsing in his forehead, he doesn’t think the message got through. “A situation where like, you disappear from the bar with no warning and I have to conduct a full-scale investigation to find out where you went—”

“We are on _shore leave_ —”

“ _So?_ Crazy shit happens on shore leave! I mean, she could’ve had a gun at your kidneys or something, I had to _check_ —”

“By asking me if I knew your childhood pet’s name?”

“Well, I thought, you know, if you answered wrong, or didn’t give me the names of both cats, then I’d _know_ you were in trouble—”

Maine looks like he’s torn between laughing hysterically and committing murder. “When did we ever come up with that system?”

“We didn’t! That’s my point!”

“Your point?”

“My point,” Wash says, in as dignified a voice as he can muster when his partner is looming over him wearing nothing but a glorified hand towel, “is that we need to come up with a series of code questions, and use them when appropriate. That’s rule six.”

Maine stares at him. “Rule six.”

“Yes. Come up with the questions. _Use_ the questions. _Live_ by the questions.”

“Wash,” Maine says, “get the fuck out.”

“Right,” Wash mutters. “Trust me, I would love nothing more.”

Maine rolls his eyes and backtracks into his room. Wash spins on his heel, fully intending to race back down to the bar in search of the strongest liquor the place carries, but the door flies open again and Sylvia peeks out. “Wait! Wanna join us?”

Maine slaps a hand over his face as Wash turns back around and gapes at the pair of them. “Uh….I….no?” He pauses. Considers. Shakes his head firmly. “ _No_. No, no, thank you but no. You, uh. You kids have…fun.”

***

“It’s not that you aren’t attractive,” Wash says when Maine finally makes his way down to the hotel lobby the next morning. Maine pauses midstep, turning slowly to face Wash full on, and he hastens to continue. “I mean, like clinically. From a scientific standpoint. You’re, you know, a good-looking dude and all, but it would kind of be like fucking my brother.”

A full ten seconds goes by before Maine speaks. “Are you…apologizing for not having a threesome with me?”

“Yes?”

“Good god.”

“I just didn’t want you to be offended!”

“I’m not offended.”

“Oh,” Wash says, relieved. “Good. Because—“

“Irritated. That you interrupted the first sex I’ve had in months.”

“Look, I didn’t realize that you were in the _throes_ , okay—”

“Stop talking. Please.”

Wash adopts a more somber tone. “I’m just _saying_ , that if you’re gonna disappear on shore leave, you gotta tell me, first.” He reflects. “That’s rule seven.”

Maine groans, snatching the car keys from Wash’s hand and striding out to the parking lot. He waits until their bags are in the trunk and the both of them buckled in before speaking. “Brother, huh?”

His face is still stern, but Wash recognizes his tone of barely concealed laughter. “And _as_ my brother, you have to tell me where you are.”

“Fine. Deal. Rule seven.”

Wash side-eyes him. "Your name's not really Eddie, is it?"

"Course not. That's my shore leave name."

"Your _shore leave name?_ You mean like, your stud name?"

Maine doesn't look phased in the slightest. "Gotta have a name ready to go."

Wash pauses. "Okay. I'll be Ronnie when we're on shore leave."

"Ronnie?"

"It's no worse than Eddie!"

"God..."

"And that reminds me, _Eddie_ , we need some code questions to go with our code names, so if _you_ had any childhood pets, now's the time to spill..."

**Rules eight and nine.**

Maine breaks the door down to the sound of Wash screaming.

The sound cuts through the calm, reasoning part of his brain like a knife, all thoughts of stealth forgotten. He was never good at stealth anyway; he was made for action and power and MOVE and GO. This mission had forced him into stealth, because one wrong move meant that Wash was dead, but now Wash was screaming like he’d never heard him scream and that meant it was time to MOVE, time to GO.

Maine puts his armored boot through the door and snaps the lock clean in half. The aftershock sends a sickening jolt through his leg, but there’s no time to worry about that now. He thunders around the perimeter, bullets pinging off of his overshield, and takes in the situation. Wash is bound to a chair in the middle of the room, his helmet and several other pieces of armor discarded nearby. He’s hurt, blond hair stained with bright red blood, but he’s alive, so Maine turns his attention to systematically ending the lives of the pirates who have been interrogating him. They break rank quickly before his brute strength, and Maine knows that the only reason they got the jump on him and Wash in the first place was due to sheer numbers and good timing.

The last pirate is a little smarter than the rest, and before Maine can stop him, he’s got a knife jammed up under Wash’s chin. “Take one more fucking step, and you get to watch me skin your buddy alive.”

Maine freezes, and Wash’s eyes flutter back open. Now that he is able to take a closer look, Maine can see why they removed his chest plate: the Kevlar suit on Wash’s left side is torn open, the exposed skin underneath red and raw, almost as if—

“Turns out your friend here doesn’t like fire,” the pirate says conversationally, and Maine forces his eyes away from the burns on Wash’s ribs. “He still won’t tell us anything, though. Maybe you will.”

“Maine,” Wash says, his voice labored and twisted with pain. “Go.”

Maine has never met anyone with such a strong sense of both self-preservation and self-sacrifice, and it’s absolutely maddening. He’s gonna _kill_ Wash once they get out of this mess. For now, he ignores him, noticing for the first time that the pirate has something else clenched in his other fist: some sort of gun, except when he turns it on, it spits out a dark, blue flame.

Wash flinch is so slight that Maine is sure the pirate doesn’t notice it. Maine does, however. Maine sees the flinch, and he sees the panic deep down in Wash’s eyes, hidden well behind the strength and the stoic facade. “I want everything you’ve got on Freelancer, and I want it now. Let’s start with where the base is.”

“Maine—”

“Not another word out of you,” the pirate snaps, and he glances back up at Maine. “ _Well?_ ”

Maine grits his teeth, and when neither he nor Wash makes a sound, the pirate edges the open flame closer and closer to the side of Wash’s neck until Wash lets out a strangled gasp, thrashing instinctively away from the pain. Fire. Who used fire anymore as a means of torture? Ridiculous. Outdated. There were far more effective means of getting information than—

The thoughts chase themselves wildly through his head as Wash’s gasp turns to a scream. Maine forces himself to wait he struggles so hard that the pirate’s attention on Maine drops infinitesimally, and then decides it’s time to MOVE; it’s time to GO.

He moves. He goes. The pirate is dead at his feet less than a second later, head twisted almost all the way around on his neck. He takes special care to stomp on the man’s head as he moves around behind Wash to examine the binding on his wrists. “Well that was fun,” Wash says weakly, and Maine snaps the metal between the cuffs.

Wash sways sideways out of the chair, and Maine barely manages to break his fall. He lays Wash down, examining him critically and taking stock of the injuries: a dislocated knee and thumb, two broken fingers, burns on his left side and neck, and a nasty looking gash across his forehead. He pops Wash’s thumb back in, and to his credit, Wash doesn’t yelp. Probably didn’t yelp when it was popped out, either. Probably why they gave up on breaking his fingers. He knows from experience that Wash has a very high threshold for pain, but the way his face is twisted now tells Maine that they have to _go_.

Wash does let out a cry when Maine pops his knee back in, and his eyes go fuzzy like he’s going to pass out before they turn glassy and bright. “Fucking _Christ_ , that stings.”

That _stings_. Good god. Maine locks Wash’s armor down around his knee and stands. He hefts Wash up onto his shoulders, careful to avoid aggravating the burns on his side. “Got you,” he says, because he needs Wash to know this, needs him to know that come hell or high water, they are getting the fuck out of this building.

“Okay,” says Wash, but he tenses two seconds later. “My armor—”

“I’ll get it later.”

“But—”

“Later.”

Wash quiets long enough for Maine to radio in to Carolina and tell her to lay down some cover fire, they’re on their way. “You’re pissed at me,” Wash says, the second Maine signs off. He at least has the good grace to sound guilty.

“Yup.”

“Maine, come on—“

“Stupid. Should’ve called me.”

“I didn’t want—“

“Shut up,” Maine says fiercely, because he knows how that sentence is going to end. Something like _I didn’t want you to get hurt_ or _I didn’t want to put you in danger_. Ridiculous, because this is what Maine is made for: crashing through walls, getting people out, moving, going. He is the cavalry, has always been the cavalry. He is white armor and the slump of relief in his teammates’ shoulders when they see him crashing on through.

Wash remains silent while Maine gets them out of the building and onto the Pelican. He opens his mouth in protest when Maine does an about face to get the armor, but closes it with a frown. Smart of him.

By the time Maine returns, Wash is teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. The rest of his team has rolled his undersuit down to the waist, and he can see the full extent of the burns covering Wash’s side. Carolina is kneeling next to him, applying some sort of salve to the burns and saying, “we’ll get you the good stuff when we’re home, rookie.”

“Thanks, Lina,” Wash says, and Maine watches Carolina’s jaw go tight.

Maine puts the armor down next to Wash and glances at Carolina. “He gonna be okay?”

“He’ll be fine,” Carolina says. “Thanks, Maine.”

He grunts and turns away, only just noticing when Wash grabs ineffectually at his ankle. “Maine, don’t be mad,” he says, his voice going loopy in the way it always does when he’s on painkillers. “C’mon.”

But he _is_ mad, he’s _furious_ , and Wash should know that, should know better, should have called him, should have….

He doesn’t turn back around, but he doesn’t pull away, either. He just stands there, avoiding the glances of everyone in the Pelican, until the painkillers finally knock Wash out, until his hand uncurls from around Maine’s shin.

***

It’s nearly a full day before he visits Wash in the infirmary, and when he does, he stands outside the door for nearly five minutes first. He finally walks in, not quite as calm as he would like, but calmer, at least. Wash is sitting up, leaning against a pile of pillows with his datapad in his lap. He’s pale, but overall Maine has to conclude that the medics weren’t lying: he’s okay.

He's lucky.

Wash sighs, turning off his datapad. “Okay, look, before you tell me off, can I at least say thank you—“

“No.”

“—for saving my life?”

“No.”

“Seriously? No? You’re not gonna let me thank you—“

And suddenly Maine’s anger is running at full throttle again. “You were in trouble. I came. We’re partners. _That’s what I’m supposed to do._ You almost didn’t let me do it.”

“I didn’t want—”

“New rule,” Maine says. “No one plays the hero. _You don’t play the hero_.”

“I wasn’t trying to be a hero—”

“You do this thing.”

“What—I don’t do a thing,” Wash says, defensive, and Maine glares at him.

“You don’t even know what I’m gonna say.”

“I have an idea,” Wash mutters.

“You do this thing,” Maine continues, “where you lie to me.”

Whatever Wash was expecting, it wasn’t that, and the shock registers clearly on his face. “What?”

“You heard me,” Maine snaps. “You lie. You’re a liar.”

The shock instantly fades away into hurt, and Maine wants to strangle him for being so open, for telegraphing every emotion onto his face like it means nothing, like there aren’t people who would take that and use it against him. “I’m not—“

“You are. You say you’re fine when you’re not. You say you don’t need back-up when you do. You broke rule three.”

Now the hurt is morphing rapidly into a defensive anger. “I did not—I wasn’t hurt when you radioed me!”

“But you were about to be.”

“I was not!”

“You’re lying again. To my face.”

“I—“ Wash cuts himself off, breathing deep. “Maine, come on.”

“I was right there. You could’ve called me. You didn’t. Why?”

Wash throws up his hands. “Christ, Maine! Then we both would’ve been fucked!”

“You don’t know that-“

“And you know what?” Wash continues loudly. “I don’t understand how this is any different than you jumping in front of a bullet and then trying to tell me to fucking leave you when _you_ were hurt.”

Maine grits his teeth hard at that. “That was different.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Took us almost a day to find you,” Maine says, and the crippling anxiety that he’d felt in that time, when they didn’t know where Wash was, when there was nothing to do but let North and South run intel, seeps back into his bones. “A _day_. While they were interrogating you.”

They glare at each other until Wash rakes a hand through his hair impatiently. “Look. I can handle torture. I’ve been through RTI, same as you.”

“That’s not the point—”

“Wanna know what they took marks off for every time, in training?”

That gives Maine pause, and Wash continues. “So long as it was just me in the room, I was fine. Passed with flying colors. But when they’d bring one of my teammates in, and hurt them, then I…” he stops, clears his throat, and Maine suddenly has the feeling that they’re not just talking about training anymore. “I broke.”

Wash turns to get some water from the cup on his other side, and Maine pretends not to notice that he takes a long time to turn back around. “If you had come after me,” Wash continues finally, “then they might’ve gotten you, too. They would’ve tortured _you, too,_ and if they’d done it in front of me, I…I would’ve told them everything.”

Maine is built to crash through walls, but Wash’s blunt honesty nearly knocks the wind out of him. “Lost a partner once,” he says, before the feeling to reciprocate wears off. He clears his throat. “Just like this. Had to listen on the radio while he…while they…”

He stands abruptly, walking over the window. It’s easier, this way. “He could’ve called me. I would’ve come. That’s what I do.”

“I’m sorry.” He can hear Wash fidgeting. “Maine, it’s not that...look, I _know_ you would’ve come.”

Maine turns back around to face him. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” Wash says. “Yeah. I do.”

They’re silent for a while, the anger in the room fading to something more familiar. “You have to call me when you’re pinned down,” Maine says. “You have to tell me when you’ve been shot. That’s what partners do. It’s the only way this works. No more lies. Rule eight.”

“I thought rule eight was, no one plays the hero.”

Maine’s frown lifts when he realizes Wash is biting back a grin. “Rule nine, then. No lying on a mission. Deal?”

He holds out his hand, and Wash shakes it. “How many rules are we gonna have?”

“Ten. Good number.”

Wash laughs then, and it’s a bright, startled sound. “Alright. Ten it is.”

* * *

 

**Rule ten.**

They almost don’t make it to rule ten.

Wash has to kill half of the troopers on the Simulation Base before their rescue finally comes. Maine has long fallen unconscious, the blood shockingly bright against his white armor. Wash wonders, a little deliriously, if that’s why Maine chose white armor to begin with—for the shocking, terrifying sight of white on red.  Wash puts pressure on the gaping wound in his partner’s throat and tells him that he’s okay, he’s fine, he’s alive.

The surgery takes hours and Maine crashes more than once, but Wash doesn’t leave. He stands outside the observatory window the whole time, hands balled up into fists that only unclench when they tell him that Maine is stable. He spends the night cramped up in the visitor’s chair next to Maine’s bedside, feeling immeasurably guilty.

Maine takes the news that he may never speak again in stride. He looks so furious when Wash starts to apologize for not getting there fast enough that he stops. This isn’t about him, after all. It’s about Maine, and getting him through this.

It’s nearly a week before they determine that Maine’s voice is all but gone. He will still be able to form words, but they will be guttural, and as his throat needs to heal, he shouldn’t even attempt them for some time. York remarks optimistically that at least it happened to someone who was a man of few words in the first place, and Wash hits him so hard he fractures his hand and blackens York’s good eye. The two of them spend the next two days in stony silence before York apologizes.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he mutters. “I just—you know I don’t think sometimes.”

“I know,” Wash says quickly. “I know. It’s just, everyone’s acting as if he’s dying, but he’s _not_. Command is getting all weird about putting us together for future missions. We can work around this. Just because he can’t talk doesn’t mean he can’t communicate.”

“You can use the in-text option on missions,” York offers, clearly eager to help. “It doesn’t have to be the radio. Command doesn’t know shit about good partnerships.”

“Yeah,” Wash says slowly, an idea dawning on him. “Yeah, text. Words. Yeah, thanks!”

York raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re welcome?”

“I gotta run, but thanks, York…” he pauses. “And uh. I’m sorry I hit you in the face. I overreacted.”

York waves a dismissive hand. “Go on, Wash, move it. Looks like you’ve got something important to do.”

Wash moves. He goes.

Thirty minutes later he’s plopping into the chair at Maine’s bedside and dropping a whiteboard and several markers into his lap. Maine stares at the objects momentarily, before lifting them up and blinking at Wash.

“It’s a way to communicate,” Wash explains. “I mean. If we need it. I figure it won’t take us long to figure out a system, like, you know…”

He exercises a series of complicated hand gestures that has Maine grinning for the first time in weeks. “And on the missions, we can use the in-text option. But I thought this might be a way to show them that we can still work together just fine. And for you to…you know….have a voice. Make sure people don’t…I mean…I just want to make sure you’re talking, when you have something to say.”

He’s babbling, he knows, but the words aren’t coming out right, and he casts around for what he really wants to say. “That’s rule ten,” he says finally. “We still talk. No matter what.”

Maine glances between him and the whiteboard a few times before slowly uncapping the marker. _THANKS._

Wash shakes his head. “We’re partners. That’s what we do.”

Maine stares at the whiteboard for a while before wiping the words away with his hand and scrawling new ones. _THINK WE HAVE TIME TO MAKE THIS WORK?_

As it turns out, they do.

They don’t have _much_ time, but still—

they do.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a lot of feelings about these two okAY
> 
> also, this fic is for [eksby](http://eksby.tumblr.com), for sharing all of her thoughtful headcanons on Wash and Maine with me, and being a huge influence on the way I chose to write them in _The Long Way Down_. MANY THANK YOUS FOR THAT!
> 
> You can see the FUCKING INCREDIBLE animation eksby did for the first part of this fic [here](http://eksby.tumblr.com/post/136449721388/a-little-animation-from-littlefistss-amazing-fic), back when it was just a tiny little prompt. I almost flipped my scrambled eggs I was making off the stove when I first saw it and I'M STILL NOT OVER IT.


End file.
